More Planets than Stars in Galaxy

The more astronomers look for other worlds, the more they find. They think planets easily outnumber stars in our galaxy and they're even finding them in the strangest of places. "We're awash in planets where 17 years ago we weren't even sure there were planets" outside our solar system, said Kaltenegger. Astronomers are finding more planets using many different techiniques and telescopes in space and the ground. NASA's new kepler planet-hunting telescope in space is discovering exoplanets that are in a zone friendly to life and detecting planets as small as Earth or even smaller. A study in Nature this week states that the Milky Way averages at least 1.6 large planets per star. In order to find the planets, astronomers look for increases in brightness of distant stars that indicate planets between Earth and the pulsating star; a technique used by South American, African and Australian telescopes. That technique usually finds only bigger planets and is good at finding those further away from their stars, which means that there are probably more planets than those already discovered. Kepler together with another ground-based telescope technique are finding planets closer to their stars. Together, the number of worlds in our galaxy is probably much closer to two or more planets per star. It is also known that Kepler also found three rocky planets tinier than Earth and they are circling a dwarf star, which is only a bit bigger than Jupiter. They are so close to their small star that they are too hot for life. Scientists think that because it is too hard to see their sizes, there are plenty of them up there. “It's not just the number or size of planets, but where they are found. Scientists once thought systems with two stars were just too chaotic to have planets nearby. But so far, astronomers have found three different systems where planets have two suns.”